Default gradient shade

[andmocychmen]

Hello,

I'm not sure to understand the default behavior of the gradient tool. Why is it giving me this color, instead of reducing light? How can I make the gradient tool reduce L by default? Am I missing something?

 

[v_kyr]

See related:

• HSL and HSV , L = 1/2 max(R,G,B) + 1/2 min(R,G,B)

For further gradient adjustments ...

 

[andmocychmen]

Thanks there. However, I’m under the impression that we’re not talking about the same thing.

See on my example, the original color is almost white (a very light orange in fact). When I’m using the gradient tool, it is not simply darkening the color (reduce Light), but it’s also increasing Saturation, hence now it’s a vivid orange.

I’m using the gradient for shadows and so I only want the L to reduce. I don’t want more saturation. 

 

[firstdefence]

Do you have an example of what you are expecting? 

Have you tried the Layer Blend Mode: Luminosity?

[v_kyr]

Related to blend modes see also this and from those especially also ...

Quote

...
So on to the component group. To understand these it helps to know what Hue, Light and Saturation are. Hue is your basic colour like red, green & so on. Think of the colors of the rainbow. All of them, not just the 6 or 7 or 5 that we were told were there when we were young. Affinity Photo can churn out 360 variations of hue. Luminosity takes your basic Hue and affects how light or dark it is, so you can have almost black with a smudge or red, getting lighter to what people call a standard red & still lighter through deep pink, pale pink up to white. Saturation is how intense that red is, going from saturated, intense red & getting gradually duller, eventually becoming gray.

Now think of hue, saturation and luminosity as being 3 separate components. The component blend modes combine the different components in different ways.

Hue – Gives you the luminance and saturation from the lower layer with the hues of the top layer.

Saturation – Keeps the color intensity of the selected layer with the luminance and hue from the layers underneath. So when the active, or blend layer has an intense color it’ll show up with the brightness and hue from the layers under it. And if the top layer has only grays, it’ll desaturate the underlying layer.

Luminosity – Keeps the luminance of the selected layer and gives it the hue and saturation of the layers below. So in other words the colors of the layers below replace the colors of the layer with Luminosity color mode.

Color – keeps the hue and saturattion of the selected layer, and gives it the brightness of the layers under it. It tends to be stronger than the Hue blend mode because it has the saturation of the top layer. This is the prime layer blend mode to use for recoloring black and white images.
...

 

[andmocychmen]

Apologies, I should have been more precise in my language.

Here is what I mean:

• On the left side I have a basic shape with a HSL (227:55:78).
• Then I am swiping the gradient tool from right to left across the shape.
• In the middle is what I would like the gradient tool to do: reducing the Luminosity from a value of 78 to 49, leaving Hue and Saturation unchanged.
• On the right is the actual behavior of the tool: it will increase Saturation from 55 to 88 and reduce the Luminosity to 52.

Now my objective here is to find a setting, whereby I can tell the gradient tool how I want it to behave:

• Here, reduce luminosity.
• In another situation perhaps, reduce transparency etc.

I don't want to have to apply the gradient first, then select the gradient not to rectify the error each time. It's too time consuming.

 

[v_kyr]

Not sure where your problem is, or if I still don't understand your problem. - As I showed initially gradients are customizable, their used color points and flow, you can also add further points, or shift regions if needed, make certain regions transparent etc. - So for your middle shown rect I get that one when I adjust one endpoint accordingly, meaning here setting it's color then to H:227/S:55/L:49 ...

 

[andmocychmen]

2 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Not sure where your problem is, or if I still don't understand your problem. 

Thanks for taking the time to show all this @v_kyr. 

So the problem is a workflow order: you have to apply the gradient to the object first, then edit the gradient node to the desired HSL. That's what I'm doing.

But that's not how I need it to work: I want to :

• First modify the settings of the gradient tools so that when applied to any existing object, it would reduce Luminosity by L%.
• Then apply the gradient tool of any given HSL, and the gradient would reduce Luminosity by the % setting above.

From a practical point of view, I have an illustration with 500 + objects, each of different colors. I do not want to apply the gradient 500 times  and modify the values 500 times, but only one time and then apply the modification to 500 objects.

Does that make sense? 

[v_kyr]

Well as you've seen that's the way gradients work here and you can only predefine certain gradient colors via saving as colors etc. for reusage, or copy/paste their styles over from one object to the other. - Don't know if there is possibly for a bunch of different needed colors or gradient flow settings then maybe a better way, to make predefinitions or a default color independent settable customization for those.

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, BenjiGameDev said:

So the problem is a workflow order: you have to apply the gradient to the object first, then edit the gradient node to the desired HSL.

There actually is much more to it than just setting the color of a gradient 'node' (known as a "color stop" in Affinity terminology, somewhat similar to the SVG "stop-color" style attribute tag).

Consider all the attributes a gradient created with the (somewhat deceptively named) AD Fill Tool can have:

• The Context of the gradient (fill, or for vector & text objects the stroke)
• The Type of the gradient (Linear, Radial, Conical, Bitmap, etc.)
• The position (the X & Y coordinates) of each color stop within the object
• The midpoint between each pair of color stops
• The color of each stop (specified in any of several different mathematical color models like RGB, LAB, or HSL)
• The opacity of each color stop
• The noise content of each stop

There is no way for this tool to know in advance exactly how you want to apply all of these attributes to any arbitrary existing object or selection of objects. However, there is a way to create defaults that can be applied to multiple objects in one step, although there are limitations & (to put it as kindly as I can) a few 'quirks' you will discover if you use it.

It involves using the ability of the Swatches panel to store gradient swatches in palettes as well as solid color ones. So for example, you could create a new Application palette & add to it the gradient of some object already set up with the gradient you want to apply to other objects, & repeat that process to add more gradient swatches to the palette. That is what I did in the attached L only gradients.afpalette that you can import & experiment with if you want.

The default names automatically assigned when you add a swatch are not descriptive, so for this I renamed them manually in HSL terms like this:

(That does not mean the stop colors really are defined only in the HSL color model; they have equivalent values in the other models as well.)

To see what I mean about quirks, try making a selection that includes one or more simple vector shapes, "Curves" objects consisting of more than one path, maybe a Pixel layer or two, & so on. Next click on one of these gradient swatches to apply it to all the objects. Then click on the objects one at a time with the Fill Tool to see how (or if) they were applied. 

Of course, as @v_kyr mentioned, instead of laboriously creating these default palettes it is usually much simpler to copy an object with the desired gradient already applied to it to the clipboard & then use Edit > Paste Style on a selection of objects, but both methods can reveal the same kinds of quirks, so I suggest doing some experimenting & testing before relying on either one for production work.

[andmocychmen]

Thanks @R C-R for this. I've learned few more things about gradients now. 

Still this would provide absolute swatch parameters, and not relative parameters. So if if the objects have different colors, it would simply override the existing color to replace it with the selected swatch.

I'll push this is feature request I guess. Meanwhile, I'll do my 500 shades

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, BenjiGameDev said:

Still this would provide absolute swatch parameters, and not relative parameters. So if if the objects have different colors, it would simply override the existing color to replace it with the selected swatch.

Gradient swatches do override an object's existing colors, but there is no logical way to determine every absolute positional parameter when the objects are sufficiently dissimilar.

[v_kyr]

23 hours ago, BenjiGameDev said:

Thanks for taking the time to show all this @v_kyr. 

So the problem is a workflow order: you have to apply the gradient to the object first, then edit the gradient node to the desired HSL. That's what I'm doing.

But that's not how I need it to work: I want to :

• First modify the settings of the gradient tools so that when applied to any existing object, it would reduce Luminosity by L%.
• Then apply the gradient tool of any given HSL, and the gradient would reduce Luminosity by the % setting above.

From a practical point of view, I have an illustration with 500 + objects, each of different colors. I do not want to apply the gradient 500 times  and modify the values 500 times, but only one time and then apply the modification to 500 objects. 

Does that make sense? 

Hmm that procedure is difficult to handle with the base gradient tool, as you've seen above. - But what if you emulate something like that behavior in another manner, by misusing FX gradient overlays?

AFAI can see, when you use an FX overlay gradient you can first modify it's settings to some degree, aka blend mode luminance and then adjust opacity slider etc., in order to get a desired gradient effect, which remembers it's presettings then. Afterwards you can change colors as you want for that, which still keeps/preserves the same flow effect. You can also "copy" and then only "transfer the effect" over to already other colored existing objects. - You can give that procedure a try, maybe it's suitable for what you are after and more efficient for your work with a lot of objects then.

[v_kyr]

[andmocychmen]

Oh @v_kyr this is lovely, let me give it a try. If that indeed does the trick, AD should totally have a "Fx" tool to apply selected effect like an Fx fairy all over the drawing board. Thanks!